


at last i seized the mirage

by luminescent (pyrophane)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 12:57:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12254841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrophane/pseuds/luminescent
Summary: Outside, Neo Domino City rises from the water at the edge of the horizon, beautiful and luminous and untouchable. These days Jack finds his gaze drawn towards it more and more often, tracing the truncated vector of the Daedalus Bridge jutting out over the ocean. It’s always bright there; you’d hardly be able to see Satellite at night. You could hold out a thumb and blot it out entirely.Or, three times Jack and Crow shared a bed.





	at last i seized the mirage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intimacies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimacies/gifts).



> dear andrea, there's probably not much point in trying to stay anonymous, so i will just say that i owe you my life and i'm grateful every day for your company in card game hell. thanks for giving me the chance to write the ultimate ship, i hope you enjoy!
> 
> regentshipping and scoopshipping make brief appearances in this fic, but not really enough to merit tagging. some liberties taken with canon details and timeline. thank you to syd for looking over this!

 

 

 

 

 

_& isn’t that what you always wanted?  
_ _To be filled & emptied? _

‘Pig’, Hieu Minh Nguyen

 

 

 

 

 

They don’t really fit onto the bed anymore, but it’s raining outside, water clattering an uneven rhythm against the slate roof, and that means they have to tell the story of the Daedalus Bridge. Jack’s all limbs and awkward angles; the only redeeming part of this is that Crow barely comes up to his chest, which makes winning arguments infinitely more enjoyable. He ends up crammed against the wall to stop Crow from half-dangling off the mattress on Yusei’s other side, but he tells himself it’s warmer like this and staunchly ignores Yusei’s solid weight curled into his side.

Martha used to do it back when they were children; though they don’t need the distraction from the storm or the cold anymore, some habits are hard to break. In Jack’s personal opinion, he’s the best at retelling the story, but it’s Crow’s turn tonight.

“Once there was a man,” Crow begins, “who came to Satellite…”

The tread of the story is long worn down: the man on his d-wheel who went down to the shore every day, looking across the water to Neo Domino City until he finally realised what he had to do. How he swayed others to him with nothing more than the force of that dream. The skeleton of the bridge cobbled together from scrap iron, arching upwards towards its highest point. And of course the final moment of triumph as he soared towards Neo Domino off the unfinished bridge, and Crow’s voice drops to a solemn whisper as he says, “and he flew all the way to the other side of the ocean—”

“That’s not actually possible,” Jack interrupts. “The bridge doesn’t even go halfway to Neo Domino, how’s he supposed to—”

“Shut up,” Crow says, and reaches past Yusei to punch Jack on the shoulder. “I’m the one telling the story! If I say he flies there, then he flies there.”

“Come on, you two,” Yusei says. Jack grumbles but subsides, and Crow finishes the story the way it always does: freedom and light.

Every kid in Satellite knows the legend, but nobody knows anything else about him. Only that single moment, snapshotted in time, the man on his d-wheel forever suspended in motion against a sky scoured clean and blue, bluer than anything Jack’s ever seen, because that’s how it always is in stories like this. Blue sky, blue sea. The stub of the Daedalus Bridge like a contrail. Sun at his back. The man’s probably dead, by now, but here in Satellite he’ll live forever.

A few days ago when they were rummaging around in the junkyard Yusei lifted out some castoff from the rich kids in the city, a battered action figure whose internal mechanisms and speakers were still miraculously intact, and when Yusei pressed a hidden knob on its back it yelled _I am the King!_ in a furious tinny voice. Jack’s been thinking about it all week. One of the older kids had explained it—King of Riding Duels, the best duellist in Neo Domino City and therefore the world. Being King—it’ll mean he’ll be someone who could have things like posters and figurines modelled after him so that nobody would ever forget him, or look past him ever again. He could do it; there’s no way anyone over there knows how to want things more than he does. And—shading his eyes, squinting out across the water—he feels it burning in the pit of his stomach, like hunger but sharper, colder, harder.

Yusei and Crow don’t get it, but he’s older than them, so that’s hardly surprising. He tried to tell Yusei yesterday when they were going through the scrap looking for parts for the motor he was building. _Don’t you want something better than this?_ Jack yelled. _Having stuff—new stuff that isn’t more rust than parts, without needing to go through other people’s trash to get it—_

 _I’m happy here,_ Yusei said, _because I’m with you,_ though there was a crease between his brows as he looked down at the dented coil of copper wire in his hands. Jack counted that as a victory—those came less and less frequently against Yusei, lately—but somehow it didn’t feel as satisfying as it usually did.

“So if even the guy who built Daedalus Bridge couldn’t get to Neo Domino,” Crow is saying, clearly still hung up over Jack pointing out rational and undeniable facts, “what makes you think _you_ can?” 

“I won’t need any dumb bridge to get there,” Jack says. “I’m going to be a _king_. Like that toy we found the other day.”

“Oh?” Yusei says. He tilts his head to gaze at Jack, all intense unblinking focus.

“Well, you better not be thinking of leaving us behind,” Crow says. “I won’t ever forgive you! And neither will Yusei!”  

Yusei smiles, a small, fleeting thing, and Jack scowls, ducks his head to hide the sudden rush of heat to his face. Outside, the rain eases. They’re really getting too old for this kind of thing. Soon Jack won’t have any excuses left to stay with them like this. “Keep up with me and we’ll all go together,” he says.  

 

 

 

 

  

 

The sun capsizes itself beneath the skyline and Jack snaps awake, his body preparing itself for the adrenaline kick of a duel. An insistent staticky buzz at the back of his head. It feels like he’s crawling out of his own skin, but—he walked away from Yusei, from Kiryu, and if there’s one thing he doesn’t do, it’s go back.

He stares at the ceiling, cataloguing each individual spiderweb crack, each stain. Sleep continues to elude him. He sits up, reaches for his deck, fans the cards out in front of him and works through every opening combo he can think of. Shifts the card balance, tries again. It’s difficult to deckbuild when he’s missing a true ace, a signature monster to centre his plays around, and in the end he swaps every card he’d added in back out, leaving his deck unchanged. There’s only so much he can do with what he has, and he despises it, the futility of the whole thing, this one limit he can’t overcome because it has nothing to do with his own abilities, only the fact of where he was born.

Jack grits his teeth and gathers his deck with a sweep of his hand and stalks outside, feet automatically angling themselves towards the shore, the splinter of the unfinished Daedalus Bridge. The air’s a little cleaner by the water but it still reeks of Satellite, dust and rot, and does absolutely nothing to clear his head. He isn’t Team Satisfaction anymore. He walked away. But the knowledge of that resolution isn’t enough to quell the fight humming in his bones, no outlet for the sour, simmering energy wound tight just beneath his skin. His body is a bruise, sore with unease. He wants blood on his knuckles, the weight of his duel disk on his arm, the wild reckless rush of an all-or-nothing gamble, which is why he finds himself pounding on the door of Crow’s hideout at something like two in the morning.

Crow appears in the doorway, scrubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Do you even know what time it is,” he snaps, before he processes Jack’s presence and his mouth pulls taut.

“Duel me,” Jack demands.

There’s a refusal on the tip of Crow’s tongue—Jack can read him easy as anything, plain in the tense curl of Crow's fingers—but then again, the familiarity runs both ways, and Crow eyes him for a long moment before stepping aside to let him in. “We can duel out the back,” Crow says. “I don’t want to wake up the kids.”

Outside, Neo Domino City rises from the water at the edge of the horizon, beautiful and luminous and untouchable. These days he finds his gaze drawn towards it more and more often, tracing the truncated vector of the Daedalus Bridge jutting out over the ocean. It’s always bright there; you’d hardly be able to see Satellite at night. You could hold out a thumb and blot it out entirely.

The duel begins. Jack wins the first, and the second, slamming through Crow’s defenses before he has a chance to set up his plays, but Crow rallies and takes the third. He memorises the serrated sting of such a close defeat; he won’t make the same mistakes twice. Soon, he’ll be good enough that Crow won’t even be able to touch him—not even Yusei, Yusei with his perfect draws and five-card chains and way of looking at him like he knows him, like he knows exactly what he’s going to do, will be able to touch him.

“We’re done here,” Crow says, sliding his duel disk off his arm and walking towards Jack. He looks exhausted, bleakly furious; Jack has an arsenal of taunts ready— _giving up so soon, is that all you’ve got—_ but hesitates. Figures that if he’s ever going to concede anything to Crow it might as well be now, when they’re the only two people left on their side.

“Fine,” Jack says, and before the balance tips too far over, he lifts his chin imperiously and adds, “Not like you were going to beat me again.”

For a vertiginous moment he thinks, wildly, that Crow might punch him, or kiss him, or that he might kiss Crow; cup a hand over the back of his neck and close the negligible distance between them. And—he wants this, too, the heat of Crow’s mouth, Crow pinning him down, but he knows already he won’t ever ask. Once, coming down from the post-mission high, Kiryu pushed him up against a concrete pillar and kissed him, laughing into his mouth, all of him warm and bright and delirious with joy or something like it. He set a hand to the join between Jack’s shoulder and neck, thumb tucked beneath his jaw, and said, _this isn’t enough for you, is it? Satellite, I mean,_ and Jack was too distracted to respond then but of course it isn’t, the world is so much bigger than Satellite, than even Neo Domino City, and he deserves more than this, he knows he’s meant for something better. It’s the same visceral instinct that told him duelling was worth more than the manic light in Kiryu’s eyes, that made him walk away from Team Satisfaction. There are other paths to immortality.

“Whatever, don’t get complacent,” Crow says, finally. He brushes past Jack. “You should stay. It’s nearly morning, anyway.”

“Fine,” Jack says, again. He crosses his arms over his chest and sneers at Crow’s retreating back, just on principle.

He shouldn’t feel like an intruder, but he does. Crow’s always been scrupulous about maintaining his own space, from the moment they moved out of Martha’s, and it occurs to Jack that he’s never seen the inside of Crow’s room here. It’s an unsettling realisation, to know that there are parts of Crow he isn’t privy to even though they’ve known each other nearly all their lives.

Crow disappears to check on the kids and Jack climbs into the bed, though it’s certainly too small to fit both of them at the same time. He’s the guest here, after all, so it’s his prerogative. He counts his breaths until he hears the creak of approaching footsteps. The bed dips alarmingly; Crow’s weight settles against his back, a careful point of contact.  

“I should’ve seen this coming,” Crow says. His voice floats over, unanchored from its speaker in the dark.

“What, Kiryu losing it?”

A measured exhale. “Yeah. And Yusei’s still—”

“It’s Yusei,” Jack says, shortly. Meaning, _he can take care of himself._ Meaning, _he’s made his choice and we’ve made ours and we don’t go back, you and I, so let’s not—let’s not—_

Crow doesn’t respond. When Jack shifts to look at him he’s fallen asleep, in a facsimile of what they had when they were children, but there’s barely enough space for the two of them here, let alone an absent third, and they’ve outgrown those selves, anyway. One day, Jack thinks, he’ll outgrow this self, too.

It’s almost dawn. A watery silver haze seeping in through the gaps in the shutters, skimming eerily off the walls. The shadows draw close around them, bristling. Easy to mistake Crow for a stranger, in this light. He is close enough that Jack imagines he can feel the warmth of Crow’s breath fanning across his shoulder. _I won’t ever forgive you if you leave,_ Crow is saying, in a dream, or in a memory. Jack turns away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This year, the Ride Ace League championships bring Jack back to Neo Domino City. He’s missed Carly by a few days—she’s chasing up leads for some major investigative scoop in France, tight-lipped on the specifics but cheerfully effusive in wishing him _good luck!_ in the video message she left for him. They seem to be constantly just missing each other, lately, lives a single step out of sync.

But the championships have also brought Crow back to Neo Domino, a fact which Jack discovers when he nearly bowls Crow over in the lobby of the hotel the competitors are staying at. “You!” Jack barks, brandishing an accusatory finger at him.

Crow smiles, crooked. “It’s me,” he says. “Thought the transfer was only going to go through in time for next season, but looks like I made it to this one after all.”

“About time,” Jack says, injecting all the command he can muster into his voice. “It’s disrespectful to keep a king waiting so long.”

“Yeah, well, don’t count on staying King for much longer!"

In the end it’s Jack and Crow in the finals, as he’d expected, and Jack retains his title, though by a narrower margin than he’d like. Still, it’s a good duel—always is, when he’s up against Crow, the newest evolution of a deck he’s been playing since they were children—and he finds that he’s missed it, this easy camaraderie, this certainty of challenge. Even after so long he knows precisely where he stands, with Crow.

When all the formalities are over and Crow’s grasped his hand and promised a rematch next year, he wastes no time in exercising his superior height advantage and pressing Crow up against the door of his hotel room. Crow grins, sharp enough to cut, laces his fingers behind Jack’s head and tugs him down. For a moment they’re both smiling against each other’s mouths too much to properly kiss, before Crow shoves his thigh between Jack’s legs and bites at his lower lip, insistent as ever.

“So bossy,” Jack murmurs, brushing a thumb over the jut of Crow’s hipbone.

Crow pushes him backwards onto the bed, moves his hands down, his callused duellist’s fingers, rough from a lifetime spent with his hands buried in scrap metal or gripping a deck, sliding over Jack’s stomach to grip his dick. The scar through the meat of his palm from the time they were racing each other up the latticed boom of the old crane in the junkyard and Crow slipped and gashed his hand open on a protruding strut, the assortment of tiny miscellaneous nicks dusting his knuckles, most of them familiar, some of them not. “That’s why you like me,” he retorts.

Usually, Jack would argue this point, but Crow’s making it very difficult to maintain coherent thought. In some fit of teenagerish sentimentality he’ll definitely deny later, he reaches for Crow’s hand to link their fingers together as they’re moving together, and the quirk of Crow’s mouth softens. He pauses, flattens his other hand out over Jack’s hip. Jack looks up at Crow, flushed and in disarray, and thinks with hazy satisfaction that that was his work.

As if he can hear Jack’s thoughts, Crow rolls his eyes. “Don’t look so smug,” he says, and leans down to kiss Jack before he can protest.

Afterwards, Crow tugs Jack into the shower with him and Jack crowds him against the smooth grey tile and for about five minutes things are progressing agreeably before Crow glances guiltily at the showerhead and Jack winces, Martha’s old lectures on not wasting resources intruding on the moment; some habits are too deeply ingrained to break, despite the years he’s had to remake himself.

Eventually they make their way back to the bed. Crow drives an elbow into his ribs until Jack grumbles and shifts over to give him more space. “So the tournament season’s nearly over for the year,” Crow says, winding his arms around Jack’s waist.

“Yeah, so?”

“Read between the lines, idiot! How long’s it been since we last saw Yusei?”

Jack scowls. “I said I wasn’t going to go back,” he says. “That was the point of everyone leaving the team, I don’t need anyone else in my way,” but it doesn’t even sound convincing to his own ears. The last time Jack left he’d come back, in the end, hadn’t he? Always, he keeps coming back to Yusei. “I bet he wasn’t even watching—”

Crow smacks Jack on the arm without any real force. “Get your head out of your ass! I’m sure he misses you too. Honestly, if you still can’t understand that after ten years—”

“I never said I missed him!” Jack splutters, and Crow laughs into his shoulder.

He has everything he wanted as a child—kingship, an undefeated record, his name inextricable from the history of the city—and still he finds himself wondering if Yusei’s duelled anyone else since the last time he was in Neo Domino City. What kind of life he’s built here, if any of it will still be familiar to him, the minute details of Yusei’s presence: the warmth of his hands, his gaze. How it feels to give his all and have someone push back, match him step for step.

From the window he can just make out the architectured swoop of the completed Daedalus Bridge cleaving the ocean in two. Hard to believe it had ever been anything else. Satellite and Neo Domino only two parts of a greater whole, now, though the memory of that old resentment, looking out across the water at the unattainable, isn’t so long buried. But here they are, the living proof of that history, steeped in it more deeply than the marks that were once on their forearms. The fate they forged for themselves. The immortal future ahead.

“Think it’s about time we went home,” Crow says.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
